Time Lapse Pirate Illustration Video

Our last illustration has been about a Pirate. We wanted to illustrate a whole character to see what difficulties we could experience. Specially working with body and clothing. We liked to show our process of creating a digital illustration with Adobe Illustrator from a sketch. So we recorded our first Time Lapse Video.

Time Lapse Pirate Illustration Video

When we start an illustration can happen two things, we know exactly what we are going for or we have a vague idea. In this case we knew we wanted to create a whole character but we didn’t know what kind. We started sketching really raw lines to see what poses we were going to experiment with. The Pirate concept started to show up very naturally. We thought it was a great character to play with. Pirates are fun. They have a ton of different features and characteristics that help to identify them.

After sketching (that’s part of our process we can talk about in another post) we were ready to start digitalizing. It only took us two sketches. The concept worked out really fast.

We have been lately watching a ton of time lapses from other artists. It can help so much in terms of techniques and inspiration. We decided to put together our first time lapse video to show our process of illustrating with Adobe Illustrator.

Our Illustration Process

In our case, when we design and illustrate characters we always struggle with eyes, noses and hands. I guess each illustrator struggle with different things, but I think eyes and noses are kind of a common issue. I recommend to go to Pinterest and look for some inspiration and references. You will be trying several times until you find your own style and feel comfortable drawing those features. Part of the journey is finding your own style.

As I said we have been lately watching a lot of tutorials from illustrators and 3D artists. In those videos they explain their own frustrations and issues and how they solve them. Usually it’s just a matter of invested hours. It’s comforting when really talented artists encourage you keep practicing. At the end practice is what makes you excel in Illustration, and that’s applicable to any other matter in life.

We love to give some detail to our illustrations. During our process we changed colors, removed and added stuff. It’s specially really helpful to take a break for some hours or even a day. When you go back to the illustration with fresh eyes you can easily fix things that you were struggling with before. This illustration was made in 5 effective hours in front of the computer. That doesn’t include sketching or looking for references. We are pretty happy with the result.

We will be posting more illustrations and time lapses. Keep posted to follow us thru our journey and feel free to comment or ask anything thru our Social Networks.